With its new Pixel 9 phones, Google Assistant is getting a demotion.

In its place, Google’s will ship Gemini as the default voice assistant on its flagship phones. Gemini uses large language models to interpret questions and generate answers, which means it can respond in a more conversational way.

But while Google is eager to showcase Gemini as an answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tossing out Assistant is a mistake. Too often, Gemini fails at performing basic tasks, and it’s going to cause lots of frustration for folks who depend on their phone’s voice control features. Although Google says Gemini can now handle many of the same instructions as Assistant, that hasn’t been my experience at all.

As evidence, I submit a list of useful Google Assistant actions that either aren’t possible or don’t work properly with Gemini.

Local results are worse

When you ask Google Assistant what time Target closes, you’ll get a helpful list of nearby locations, their corresponding hours, phone call buttons, and links to Google Maps directions.

The same query in Gemini produces a less useful response: “Most Target stores close at 10 PM.” While Gemini does return accurate answers for some businesses, it’s never with the same useful context and formatting as Assistant.

Gemini can’t take notes

The ideal voice assistant should help you capture ideas you’re too busy to stop and write down. Google Assistant is great at this, letting you dictate notes to be saved in Google Keep.

When you try to take a voice note with Gemini, the only response is “Sorry, I can’t help with that.”

No-can-do on to-do lists

While Gemini understands time-based reminders and will save them in Google Tasks, it doesn’t understand how to add items to a to-do list.

By comparison, Google Assistant can add items to either Google Tasks or Google Keep. You can even set up multiple lists—like one for packing and another for groceries—and use voice to assign items accordingly. I rely on this Assistant feature almost daily, but Gemini doesn’t support it.

Weather doesn’t work right

Weather forecasts are one of the most basic use cases for digital assistants, yet Gemini routinely flubs it by giving me details from the state of Washington, while Assistant had no problems telling me the weather here in Cincinnati.

I’m guessing this is just a bug, but it happened on both a Google Pixel 8a and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5, even though the Google app has access to my location on each device.

Turn-by-turn directions don’t load

Ask Google Assistant for directions, and you’ll see a “Start” button that immediately launches into turn-by-turn navigation from Google Maps.

The same instructions fail in Gemini. While you can tap on a small link to open directions in Google Maps, it only sets an approximate starting location, and will only show a “Preview” of the directions instead of launching into turn-by-turn mode.

Music and podcast requests are YouTube-only

With Google Assistant, you can use voice commands to play music in a wide range of streaming services, including YouTube Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Apple Music, and Deezer. Assistant also supports podcasts from Spotify and YouTube Music, and it can play a variety of built-in ambient sounds, such as white noise and ocean waves.

Gemini only ties into YouTube Music instead.

Video (in)capabilities

Ask Assistant to watch a movie or show, and it’ll likely take you directly into the corresponding streaming app.

Gemini can’t do that. Instead, it’ll either tell you where that show might be available—with no link for quick access—or suggest related things to watch on YouTube.

No photo search

Want to see pictures of someone you’ve tagged in Google Photos? Just open Assistant and say “show me pictures of [person] in Google Photos.”

Gemini, given the same request, says it’s incapable of doing so as a large language model.

Bye-bye to a useful news feature

An underappreciated Google Assistant feature is the daily news briefing, which lets you say “play the news” to hear audio newscasts from providers such as NPR and The New York Times. You can also say “latest news” to see a carousel of stories from Google News.

If you ask Gemini to play the news, it provides a list of pointers on how you might go about listening to the news—not helpful—but its cold-sweat response to “latest news” is downright comical: “I’m trained to be as accurate as possible, but I can make mistakes sometimes,” Gemini says. “While I work on perfecting how I can discuss elections and politics, you can try Google Search.” Not helpful.

No Routines

Google Assistant’s Routines feature lets you automate multiple voice actions with a single voice command. It’s especially useful for smart home devices, letting you control lights, switches, and door locks all at once.

Per Google’s documentation, Gemini is supposed to support Routines in a limited capacity, but in my experience they don’t work at all, and the option to enable routines in Gemini’s settings simply does not appear.

So much for Shortcuts

With Assistant, Google started developing a neat feature called Shortcuts, which lets you quickly accomplish actions in various Android apps with a voice command. For instance, you can set up Shortcuts to call an Uber, share your Google Maps location, identify a song in Shazam, or track an exercise in Fitbit.

With Gemini, Google is replacing that system with, well, nothing. While Gemini has an “Extensions” system that ties into Google services such as YouTube and Gmail, the company has not announced any plans to extend that system to third-party developers. It’s too bad, as Apple is building out even deeper third-party app integrations with Siri in iOS 18.

A slower experience

With two Android phones running side-by-side, one running Assistant and the other Gemini, I asked a simultaneous series of questions about the weather, sports scores, and dictionary definitions. Responses from the phone running Gemini were routinely a second or two behind those from the phone running Google Assistant.

Delegated to Assistant

Strangely, some vestiges of Assistant remain inside Gemini, which will call on the older voice model to handle certain tasks. When you ask Gemini to create a reminder, send a text, make a phone call, or schedule a calendar event, you’ll see an icon indicating that Assistant accomplished the action.

Why is this distinction necessary? And if Gemini can simply invoke Google Assistant as needed, why doesn’t it do so for all the other tasks at which Assistant is clearly superior?

The most likely answer is that Google wants to be rid of Assistant entirely, preferring to move onto this new model that it hopes to monetize through subscriptions. One new feature of Gemini is a mode called “Gemini Live,” which allows for back-and-forth conversation and requires a $ 20 per month Google One AI Premium subscription. Pixel 9 users get a year Gemini Live for free.

But in its zeal for what it believes is the future of AI, Google is tossing out too many voice assistant functions that already useful today. And while users can still switch back to Google Assistant, that means being stuck with a voice assistant that’s deteriorating from neglect.

Maybe Google needs to rip the Band-Aid off at some point, but it’s definitely going to sting right now.

Fast Company

(6)